Óptica Bassol has sold premium eyewear from four stores in Barcelona since 1998, and online since 2011. Today the family-owned retailer sells sunglasses and prescription frames from more than 20 suppliers across 25 markets, with ecommerce generating 90% of its revenue on more than €15 million in annual sales.
That scale had outgrown the technology running it. Abel Villa, Óptica Bassol’s ecommerce manager, worked with a Shopify partner based in Barcelona to rebuild the entire operation on a single Shopify setup covering every market it sells in.
- Consolidated 25 separate stores into a single Shopify platform.
- Doubled year-on-year revenue once the new platform stabilised.
- Cut what used to be full days of lost sales a year down to a few hours of downtime.
The challenge: outages that cost half a day
Óptica Bassol ran its ecommerce on Magento Open Source, with roughly 100,000 products spread across 25 separate stores, one for each market it sold into. Every night, price and discount rules had to reindex across all of them before the next day’s trading began.
“Our main problem was 100,000 products across 25 markets. That gave us nightly indexing rules and cron jobs that never finished,” Villa said. When the jobs ran long, the store went down overnight, or orders went through without the discounts they should have carried, and none of it reached other sales channels in real time.
Every software deployment made things worse before it made them better. “Every time we made a change, the store went down for half a day,” Villa said, and changes had to be batched into a release cycle every 6 months, even something as small as a checkout update. Óptica Bassol first treated it as a hosting problem, moving from Cloudways to raw AWS with a specialist team. The outages continued. “We realised it wasn’t a platform optimisation problem. It was a platform problem,” Villa said.
The solution: choosing a partner for answers, not price
Óptica Bassol looked at Adobe Commerce first, the enterprise version of the platform it was already struggling with, and got the same answer: the rule-engine problem would persist even on containerised infrastructure. PrestaShop, evaluated years earlier, had known gaps. BigCommerce lacked the developer community and partner base Shopify had already built. “Shopify was leading the market, and that gave us a lot of confidence,” Villa said.
For the migration itself, Óptica Bassol turned to Fantasticfy, a Shopify partner based in Barcelona, chosen from within its local partner network.
The confidence we got from talking to Fantasticfy wasn’t just about a number... It was the answers we got to our problems.
Óptica Bassol piloted the build on a smaller storefront first. The full migration that followed, folding every one of its markets into a single Shopify setup, was one of the more technically demanding projects Fantasticfy had taken on.
The result: steady sales and double the revenue
A year and a half after switching, Óptica Bassol’s nights look nothing like they used to. On Magento, overnight processes tended to fail between midnight and 5am, so the first job each morning, weekends included, was to check the server for what had broken. Now Villa opens the app instead. “I just see that the sales curve is fine,” he said. “It’s so linear, and that gives us confidence.”
Across that year and a half, service interruptions have added up to only a few hours. On Magento, deployments alone could cost full days of sales in a single year.
The business rules that used to require a deployment now take minutes. Giving a premium brand its own look used to mean building two custom templates and scheduling a deployment that paused sales for half a day. Today, Villa applies a template to a collection directly, no developer needed, and reuses it across every other premium brand in the catalogue.
Peak trading gets the same light touch. For Black Friday, the team once had to develop extra capacity and scale servers by hand to cope with three days of concentrated traffic. Now Shopify handles that automatically.
Before, we did a master’s in CPUs and RAM. Now I can focus on my own area, which is marketing and ecommerce.
Checkout is the other part of the platform Villa singles out for stability, and Shop Pay now accounts for 35% of Óptica Bassol’s Shopify sales.
The move did have one cost. The URL restructuring caused an SEO dip that ran from March to December, the risk Villa feared most going in. Rankings have since recovered past where Óptica Bassol started, and with the platform steady, the team has been putting more behind its sales channels. Compared with a year earlier, revenue is now double.